The King Listens...

Am doing a translation for a student director of a play called "The King Listens", which is a dramatisation of a short story by Italo Calvino. Calvino himself doesn't seem to have been too sure about his suitability for writing about his chosen subject!

“Another book that I am in the process of writing talks of the five senses, demonstrating that modern man has lost his use of them. By writing about this problem, I am presented with my own problem as my sense of smell is not well developed, I lack aural attention, I am not a gourmet, my sense of touch is approximate, and I am myopic.” (Italo Calvino, Mondo scritto mondo non scritto, 1983)

Rachmaninov's Big Hands

Rachmaninov's Prelude in C Sharp minor as you've never seen it before...

p.s. get ready for pancake day

... which, horror of horrors, doesn't appear to exist anywhere else in the world apart from England. How is this possible? Changes need to be made.

Snippet

Just made me smile. Was in our kitchen humming/singing away mindlessly, when my Russian flatmate stopped me to ask what I was singing. I resang it, obviously in a beautiful clear soprano voice, and it turned out it was a popular Russian song ... that I had picked up from Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. So between 1878 when Tchaikovsky decided to weave popular Russian folk melodies into the musical fabric of his opera and 2007 when some of that music stuck in my mind, not much has changed: popular melodies are still popular.

Once upon a time:

Once upon a time, in a land far far away (I think this strange and mysterious land was called France) there stood a very big, rather imposing house:

 

And in this rather large mansion there lived two brothers,

 

whose names were Auguste and Louis Lumière. Now, these two brothers were not your average men with moustaches. No, indeed. For the brothers Lumière helped to invent moving pictures. "Moving Pictures?" I hear you cry, "What do you mean?". I mean, The Cinema. And in 1895 this enterprising pair presented the first commercial film-La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon- in the Grand Cafe, Paris. Clever, eh? And they lived right here in Lyon:

 

But perhaps this is not quite the perfect fairy tale. One day, the brothers decided that "the cinema is an invention without any future" and sold their cameras. And that is why, children, you've probably never heard of the the brothers Lumière.

Dudley Moore -

Dudley Moore in BEYOND THE FRINGE -

Just hilarious!

Rebeccake

Cake of the day:

Chocolate Marble Cake

Thanks to Delia Smith and a little bit of invention Sunday afternoon tea at the module D68 continues. Here is the recipe, not immediately findable on Delia's website as her cake was called "All-in-one Sponge Cake with Raspberry and Mascarpone Cream" and mine wasn't all in one and didn't have rasperries or mascarpone cream. However my cake was half dark chocolate/half sponge AND had chocolate icing, so I think I win this round.

"Ingredients

175g soft butter
175g caster sugar
3 large eggs
175g self-raising flour
vanilla essence
pinch of salt

And (this week's magic ingredient)

dark chocolate!"